If only one person votes, is it democratic?

I tweeted yesterday, in regard to turn-out at the first round of the Egyptian parliamentary elections:

If an election is held and 22% vote, is it democratic?

Those who responded were on the “yes” side:

Sophia Mahmud.MD. ‏@sophia_mahmud:

It is a miracle the Elections were even held! Who said they have to have fair. I bet 22% were family votes Politics

Tanweer ‏@TanweerRajwani:

Uhhh ya? What’s the threshold for participatory politics?

Mohamed Abdelmotaleb ‏@SolMohamed:

shall we cancel it and repeat it and assign minimum turnout ratio?

Josh Klemons ‏@jlemonsk:

The 2014 Midterms had only 36.4% turnout. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2014/11/10/voter-turnout-in-2014-was-the-lowest-since-wwii/ … Any different

COYG ‏@AmrGunner1:

yes

I assume some of those who retweeted might be implicit “no”s.

So what do I think about this? It was not a rhetorical question.

The answer on the most superficial level does have to be yes. Elections are and should be legally valid even if turnout is low. Some countries do have a threshold for minimum turnout, but in my experience that is not in elections but rather in referenda on important constitutional issues. It would be impractical to have a threshold for an ordinary election. You might end up with no one ever getting elected.

But low turnout still has implications, because elections are a way of conferring legitimacy. If only a single person turned out (which happens occasionally at the local level in the US), surely there would be doubts about the legitimacy of the person elected. Twenty-two per cent is several million more than one in Egypt. But you still have to wonder what the other 78% are thinking.

The question is not so much about the legitimacy of the individuals elected with such a low turnout, but rather about the legitimacy of the political system that manages to attract such a low turnout. That is not only true for Egypt but also for the US, where Josh Klemons is correct to point out the miserable turnout at mid-term polls held two years after the President is elected, usually with much higher turnout.

People vote with their feet. If they fail to turn up, that suggests disillusion, indifference and hostility, not enthusiasm, commitment and engagement. President Sisi certainly has widespread support in Egypt. I observed the constitutional referendum there in January 2014 and saw it with my own eyes. He may have lost some support since then–even the completion of the Suez Canal project does not seem to have roused much enthusiasm–but there are certainly a lot of people who think he is doing well and deserves a parliament that supports him.

The problem is that he has obliterated his opposition. Some but not all the Muslim Brotherhood supporters of 2011/12 have abandoned their cause. Nor have all the civil society activists who sparked the revolution in the first place. They just don’t want to vote because they see no real choices and don’t want to lend legitimacy to a regime that doesn’t offer them. In his understandable zeal to reestablish law and order, Sisi has done more to erase nonviolent dissent than to eliminate criminal violence against the state, which continues to plague the authorities, especially in northern Sinai.

An election can be “democratic” even if the context in which it takes place is autocratic. Slobodan Milosevic held elections often. He won them, often without much cheating at the polls because he had limited dissent to a narrow band of the population. In a democratic system, there has to be a real chance for alternation in power, even if the alternation seldom occurs (remember Japan under the LDK). If the political competition is limited to people and forces that have no chance of winning, or when they win simply switch to side with those already in power, that is not really a democracy.

So yes, the elections in Egypt were “democratic.” The African Union observers found they

…were conducted in a transparent and peaceful manner. The elections provided an opportunity for citizens to freely express their democratic right to vote.

I imagine the procedures at the polling places and in the counting were correct. But the context is not democratic and many Egyptians are therefore not taking advantage of the opportunity. I hope Egypt evolves in a democratic direction, with a vigorous opposition and the real possibility of alternation in power. But for that to happen, President Sisi is going to have to ease up on repression and welcome dissent.